


Find Sanctuary With Me

by novelogical (writingmonsters)



Category: The Alienist (TV), The Alienist - Caleb Carr
Genre: Faceplanting on John is a Good Way to Deal With Sensory Overload, Fluff, Frankly John Struggles to Understand it Too, Hurt/Comfort, Laszlo is Overwhelmed by Brain Noise, M/M, Mild Angst, Sara Struggles to Understand John and Laszlo's Weird Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:10:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15909834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/novelogical
Summary: When the world is too much, too loud, and Laszlo is incapable of silencing all the noise in his own head, he finds solace with John.John is more than happy to provide him with this small measure of peace.





	Find Sanctuary With Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misanthropiclycanthrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misanthropiclycanthrope/gifts).



> This is a headcanon that's I've had lurking around for a while - when Laszlo gets overwhelmed by brain noise he just kind of *whump* faceplants into John and this is the only thing that helps get him out of his own noisy head.

Something John said once -- a remark made in passing, years ago.

“You file everything away in that brain of yours.”

The man couldn’t possibly have known how right he was.

A library.

A filing cabinet.

Laszlo’s mind is shelves and drawers of carefully curated information, stored and arranged and neatly mapped out for instant access. Immediate recall. A repository of music and memories and the endless stores of information gleaned from books and interviews and dogged research. Some of the cabinets are brightly burnished, well-crafted; organized down to minute detail and often called upon. Others are neglected, obscured by dust covers and hidden away beneath a layer of cobwebs and time -- memories best forgotten.

Pacing the floorboards of the 808 Broadway office, Laszlo rattles the sliver of chalk in his fist and rifles through them all. Everything he knows; every bit of psychological theory, every patient interview and bit of criminal science he can recall -- he scatters it all across the vast, dark canvas of his mind. And he finds nothing.

Too many questions, and not nearly enough answers.

The chalk dust leaves his palms dry and gritty, litters white fingerprint smudges on the surface of the desk, the lapels of his jacket, the leather and cloth covers of his books. And he thinks _fingerprints_ and chews the edge of his bottom lip, considers dactyloscopy and the prints that confirmed the singular identity of their child killer -- the inadmissibility of this evidence in court. And this information, these questions and their half-answers, pile up on top of the endless recitations of _in some parts of this world, such as where dirty immigrants like yourself come from, it is often that human flesh is eaten regular_ and _on February 19th, I seen your boy parading himself outside the church with dirt and paint on his face_.

His arm aches, a slow, bone-deep pulsing of his heartbeat that echoes in the atrophied muscles, grinds itself into his marrow.

The air in the office is heavy; too still and too humid and smelling of mould.

Scratching out notes in her neat, elegant shorthand at her own desk, Sara glances up -- a knot forming between pale eyebrows -- and asks “did we consider…”

Whatever it is, they have already considered it. Have turned over and discarded a thousand and one possibilities, and Laszlo sucks in his cheeks and scrubs at the dull, heavy pulse behind his eyes when all those possibilities overturn themselves again. What if? What if? What if?

_What have we missed?_

There must be something...

_What aren’t we seeing?_

The pain dances along the line of his arm -- ever present, mostly ignored. It settles in the crook of his elbow, in the hinge where radius and ulna rotate against the humerus. And then when he moves too sharply, reaching for Ebbinghaus’s _Über das Gedächtnis,_ it rockets upward, sparks in the base of his skull, the hinge of his jaw. He digs the knuckle of his forefinger into the bridge of his nose, stifles a low, unhappy sound of pain deep in his throat, and does his best not to acknowledge the ache when it relocates itself again, settles securely to grind in the unsteady socket of his shoulder.

 _I cannot see it_.

Beyond the filmy window panes someone shouts -- a sound like a lance through the alienist’s skull. The racket of passing carriages and clap-rattle carts vibrates the Broadway Street office on its foundations, shudders the squares of thick glass in their window settings, scatters Laszlo’s thoughts into senselessness.

He can’t think.

“Doctor Kreizler?”

He lifts his head from the cradle of his palm, leaves twin smudges of chalk along his cheek, his temple. Sara. Watching him with those frighteningly clear green eyes, cataloguing all of the cracks and hairline-fractures.

She lifts her eyebrows, hands folded in the volume of her skirts. “You look pale.”

“It’s nothing,” he is quick to assure her. His own voice, clipped and too-sharp, shatters like glass against the inside of his skull. And then, pinned by her too-knowing eyes, he allows a small concession, a shrug of his shoulders. “A headache.”

Sara considers this, catalogs it, and seats herself neatly at her desk once more, re-stacking her sheaves of impeccable notes. “You do no one any good if you work yourself to distraction, Doctor,” is the only opinion she will offer on the matter.

There are too many thoughts -- all vying for attention, all hoping to draw some sort of conclusion -- too much noise on the street filtering through into the office, hammering at the tender places on his skull, chipping away his composure. Too many thoughts and he cannot think, cannot hear a single line of inquiry beyond the noise.

 _dirtier than a Red Injun_.

And what about the eyes?

He has not slept well in days -- barely manages more than an hour or two, and he is stretched thin and slightly crumpled and the smudges beneath his eyes have grown darker, the thread of his patience shorter. He will snap. He will shatter. He will go mad.

What will happen to them all, at the end of this?

 _I took him away from THAT PLACE_.

Laszlo cuts a glance at Sara who is busy paying him no attention whatsoever. He does not want it to appear to be a concession, does not want to fold to his own weaknesses, but they have installed a divan in the back room of the Broadway Street offices and he needs a moment -- just a moment -- to shut his eyes and block his ears and try to silence the tumult in his brain.

They have the fingerprints. The evidence of the use of climbing tools. An angel. A castle in the clouds -- they have testimony for what it’s worth. And it is worth a great deal. Just not in the way they need it to be. They need less a concept. More a concrete being.

 _Saucy boy_.

Laszlo cannot gather these disarticulated things and conjure up a man.

He sinks onto the low, cushioned loveseat. Gropes with trembling fingers for one of the decorative pillows, all cool satin brocade and soft greens -- it is too loud. So loud. And he cannot pick out one thought from the rest, cannot quantify or make reason of the noise. So he tries to drown it, muffles the chaos of his thoughts with his face buried in the cushion, does his best to smother himself into silence.

Just a moment’s peace -- a breath of clarity.

It is the wind-up pitch of the orchestra’s tuning, the discordant thrumming of strings and woodwinds and percussion all rolling together in a tangled crescendo of noise. And he needs to hear one note. A single string plucked.

He almost misses the solid tread of footsteps on the old floorboards, catches the familiar timbre of Moore’s voice mumbling greetings to Sara. And without thinking -- or perhaps there is a thought, another lost to the chaos of questions without answers, unsorted evidence, and unspooling theories -- Laszlo stumbles to his feet.

“... I haven’t heard a bit of news on that front,” John harrumphs as he discards his suit coat, perches his hat atop the coat rack. The sight of him, slightly rumpled, with the blithe set to his shoulders and the easiness of his voice, unclenches some vise-like, tightly knotted thing in Laszlo’s core.

“There’s some noise among the journalists about a scandal with the Van Bergens,” John says, catching sight of Laszlo hovering out of the corner of his eye. And he does not expect Kreizler to cross the distance between them in four long strides -- his expression set with single-minded purpose -- moving like an automaton, a stubborn, solid juggernaut.  “But no one’s managed to confirm -- _omph_.”

Laszlo collides with him hard enough to rock John back onto his heels, plants his face against John’s chest and garbles out a muffled, miserable groan. Immediately, there are two warm and heavy hands settled on his shoulders, a steady heartbeat that drums beneath his ear. The rise-and-fall of full lungs drawing breath.

 _Oh_.

Silence.

At last.

The weight of Laszlo’s heavy head against his chest, the alienist’s shaking hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt, sends John instantly back to Harvard. When they were so young. So long ago. When a hundred research projects and a thousand new ideas and a dozen different readings each week had kept Laszlo awake, his mind humming and electric and tripping over itself in an effort to keep a hold of it all -- when he had turned away from his desk that first night, illuminated in the golden lamplight, and pressed his face into John’s belly and whispered “I can’t stop _thinking_ . It’s too _much_.”

John smooths a hand over Laszlo’s hair, finds the spot where it starts to curl at the nape of his neck, and cannot help but smile fondly down at the alienist making unhappy noises into his cravat. “Well, hello to you too.” John makes sympathetic noises, kneading the tension from the nape of Laszlo’s neck. “I keep telling you, Laszlo, you keep thinking so hard and you’ll hurt yourself.”

Laszlo grouses.

John trails his knuckles along his spine, slow and reassuring, as an apology.

It has been years, but he remembers this. Knows intimately the rhythms of Laszlo’s private pains. In Harvard, when they had been more boys than men, Laszlo had been so fierce and so fragile -- emboldened by an excess of spitfire and radical new ideas, but always like Icarus, skirting disaster with his hubris and his brilliance, dangerously close to shattering.

They had lived together, then. A pair of young student bachelors in need of company, both a bit ragged and smarting at the edges. John, lost and listless and still mourning his brother and the crumbling of his world. Laszlo, bearing up under the weight of his own damage, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Manhattan and everything to prove.

Neurotic, obsessive, angry Laszlo. He had worked himself sick more than once, had suffered through migraines hunched over the desk beneath the apartment window as he’d written endless papers, copied diagrams and studied theories and added entry after entry into the every-growing file cabinets tucked away within the curvature of his skull.

Acutely aware of Sara’s scrutiny, of the bizarre tableau they must present, John bends his head so that the wisps of Kreizler’s hair brush against his cheek and murmurs “we are a collective effort, Laszlo. Christ knows what I’m doing here, but we are all working to stop this killer, not just you.” Drawing back just enough to uncover Laszlo’s pink, creased face, John fights the squeeze of affection high in his chest, thumbing away the smudges of chalk dust that still cling to Laszlo’s weary face. “So stuff your damned, stubborn pride and have a nap like the rest of us mortals.”

Laszlo seems to consider this for a long moment. Then he nods. They have walked this route before -- the noise is always quieter once he’s had a decent sleep, all of the files restored to their order, none of the pages missing or scrambled about, spilling from his mental cabinets, and all of the threads between them neatly drawn.

There is no missing the look in Sara’s wide eyes when John cuts a glance toward her, guiding Laszlo toward the back room. _We’re going to talk about this, John Moore._ And he spares her a grim, thin-lipped nod, all his attention on the hand hovering carefully at the base of Kreizler’s spine, on the way Laszlo leans so close against him.

On the divan, Laszlo curls himself into a tight knot of limbs and curved spine -- knees drawn to his chest, the good arm draped over his eyes -- has slept like this as long as John has known him. John perches in the precious little space left, his hip against Laszlo’s shin. With his thumb, he smooths the worry-knot of frustration from between the alienist’s straight brows, feels his own face soften and rearrange itself into something terribly, tremendously fond.

“You haven’t needed me like this for a long time,” he sighs. Tries not to sound wistful, to sound sad. Their habit -- Laszlo’s solace from his own mind -- had faded somewhere in their post-college days, in the first year after the Institute’s success. Had drifted away entirely as the research had narrowed in scope, as the library in Kreizler’s mind had grown and required only recall instead of the establishment of entire catalogs, as they had both started to mellow with age.

Laszlo’s reply comes thick and muffled from beneath his elbow. “I have always needed you, John.” He keeps his eyes closed, fine lashes fanned against his cheeks, but the left hand gropes its way down his side, searching out John’s hand in the space between them. “You ought to understand this much.”

John turns their twined hands over, presses a kiss to Laszlo’s knuckles. There is nothing else that needs to be said. He leaves Laszlo to his exhaustion, to the silence that presides at last in the back of his head. The alienist will reorder his mind, recategorize and shuffle the disorder back into perfect, exacting neatness. All will be well again.

Until the next time that he breaks.

John hardly makes it into the front office before he is met by Sara Howard’s silent, insistent stare. In a moment she has risen from behind the enormous desk, is at his side with a crease between her eyebrows and demands -- accusations -- at the ready.

“Now, look, Sara --”

In careful, measured tones, Sara muse “never in my life did I expect to see behavior like that from a man like him.” And then, diminutive as she is, she lifts her chin, stares up at John with a strange mixture of expressions on her face. Fondness. Pity. Bemusement. “You don’t need to coddle him like that, John. He isn’t a child.”

Laszlo. Sharp and shattered. A constellation of broken, bloodied glass.

“I don’t _coddle_ him.” John fumbles, casts about helplessly in search of a way to explain, to put words to the complicated thing between Kreizler and himself. “He isn’t -- you wouldn’t expect it Sara, but Laszlo is a… well, he’s a fragile sort of creature. As long as I’ve known him, for all the genius that he is, sometimes the man gets lost in himself.”

Sara snorts, rather disingenuously, rolling her eyes. “Oh, that is plenty clear.”

Leaning his hip against the edge of the desk, John spreads his hands in supplication. “All I mean by it,” he insists “is that -- well, damn it Sara, I don’t know -- I care for him.”

She folds her arms, pinning him with a look. “You care for him, or you _care_ for him, John Moore?”

Damn. Damn her keen eye and her quick mind. The woman would give Kreizler a run for his money in psychoanalysis any day. “I care for him.” John avoids any emphasis on the words. “I have always cared for him -- I am not coddling him. I… when he is too wound up in his thoughts, when he gets lost in the noise he trusts me to bring him back. And I trust him.” His mind’s eye conjures up the softness of Laszlo’s profile in low light then, the curve of a cheek and scattered freckles, the shadow of eyelashes, the perfect line of his eyebrows -- all of the small, subtle things that John has caught in minute detail. Has studied up close and in sharp relief. Has replicated on so many pages of drawing paper. “I take care of him when he needs me, and I don’t _mind it_.”

What he doesn’t say is; _I love him._

_I believe, sometimes, that he loves me. Neither one of us has to say it._

For a long moment, Sara says nothing, her expression betrays nothing. And then, her green eyes go soft, and she might not truly understand the thing between them -- John still isn’t sure he understands it himself -- but she casts a glance over her shoulder, toward the back room where Laszlo rests. Where John has settled him to reorient himself. A small smile plays at the corners of Sara’s lips. “John Moore,” she says “I think that’s the most insight I’ve ever heard from you.”

John smiles in return, lets his shoulders slump in relief. “I wouldn’t get used to it.”

He gets used to Laszlo, though. Relearns the tells -- the anxious set of his shoulders, the way he pinches the bridge of his nose and grinds his teeth. In the office on 808 Broadway, John pulls him aside with a hand feather-light on his shoulder, catches Laszlo’s attention with a look. He is there to pull Laszlo back from the brink, to drag him from the cacophony of his own thoughts before they become too loud; Laszlo wraps his arms around John’s middle and John cradles the brilliant, burdened head against his heart, and carves out a sanctuary for them both. Some small peace in the midst of their bloody, terrible darkness.

They each sleep the better for it.


End file.
